Sylva Sylvarum: or, A Natural Historie in Ten Centuries. Written by the Right Honourable Francis Lo. Verulam Viscount St. Alban. Published after the Authors death, By William Rawley, Doctor in Divinity, one of his Maiesties Chaplaines. Hereunto is now added an Alphebeticall Table of the principall things contained in the whole Worke. The fifth Edition by Bacon, Sir Francis (1561-1626) - 1639

London: Printed by John Haviland, for William Lee, and are to be sould at the Great Turks head next to the Mitre Taverne in Fleetstreet, 1639. FIFTH ENGLISH EDITION. Hardcover. Fine. An attractive, crisp copy in contemporary English speckled calfskin, ruled in blind (light wear to extremities, discreet repairs to head-cap, the lowest compartment of the spine sympathetically restored; a few light scrapes to the boards.) Complete with the engraved allegorical title page (dated 1631) and engraved portrait of Bacon. The text is type-ruled throughout. Small tear in outer margin of title (no loss). Woodcut head-pieces and initials at the opening of each book. The "New Atlantis" is introduced by a separate, undated title page. Provenance: 18th c. black ink stamp of a ram, with "Sheppard" and the number "10" stamped beneath. Possibly the mark of Thomas Sheppard (d. 1763). See David Pearson, "Book Owners Online" for more on this puzzling stamp. First published in 1627, the year after Bacon's death, the "Sylva Sylvarum" was intended as one part in a suite of natural histories that occupied much of Bacon's energies in the last years of his life. Cumulatively, these natural and experimental histories were to constitute Part III of Bacon's "Instauratio Magna" (the Great Renewal). "The 'Histories', or collections of data, were to be drawn up systematically and used to raise an ordered system of axioms that would eventually embrace all the phenomena of nature." (DSB)

This volume also contains the tract entitled 'The New Atlantis', Bacon's vision of an ideal scientific society, the goal of which 'is the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of the Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.'

"Along with Descartes, Bacon was the most original and most profound of the intellectual reformers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He had little respect for the work of his predecessors, which he saw as having been vitiated by a misplaced reverence for authority, and a consequent neglect of experience. Bacon's dream was one of power over nature, based on experiment, embodied in appropriate institutions and used for the amelioration of human life; this could only be achieved if the rational speculations of philosophers were united with the craft skills employed in the practical arts.

"The route to success lay in a new method, one based not on deductive logic or mathematics, but on eliminative induction. This method would draw on data extracted from extensively and elaborately constructed natural histories. Unlike the old induction by simple enumeration of the logic textbooks, it would be able to make use of negative as well as positive instances, allowing conclusions to be drawn with certainty, and thus enabling a firm and lasting structure of knowledge to be built.

"Bacon never completed his project, and even the account of the new method in the 'Novum Organum' (1620) remained unfinished. His writings nevertheless had an immense impact on later seventeenth century thinkers, above all in stimulating the belief that natural philosophy ought to be founded on a systematic program of experiment...

"Perhaps the best picture of Bacon's final vision can be found in a work of a very different kind [and] of uncertain date. The 'New Atlantis' is an account of an imaginary voyage to an island in the Pacific Ocean, and of the scientific institution, Salomon's House, found there. Like most utopian narratives, this is deeply revealing of its author and provides the fullest picture we have of Bacon's picture of a reformed, active science, and of the kind of institution that he saw as necessary to its flourishing. It also had a profound influence on the millennialist, visionary Baconianism of the 1640's and on the founders and early practice of the Royal Society." (Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

In his "New Atlantis", Bacon recounts a fictitious journey to the Island of Bensalem, a Utopian Christian society governed by laws set forth by the Law-Giver, King Solamona. The most completely delineated aspect of Bacon's utopian nation is the Order of Salomon's House, a society of fellows "dedicated to the Study of the Workes and Creatures of God." The end of this scientific society is "the Knowledge of Causes, and Secret Motions of Things; and the Enlarging of the bounds of Humane Empire, to the Effecting of all Things possible." The society maintains laboratories for conducting a vast array of experiments in all aspects of natural phenomena; it is, in fact, the perfect instrument for executing Bacon's plan as outlined in his "Instauratio Magna", of which the "Sylva Sylvarum" is one part.